November 11th, 2020
Today I took some time to find things. I like pictures and playing with them and doing the occasional screen shot. It took me a little bit to figure out the screenshot thing, and I didn't figure that out until I learned how to download and install a program.
Finding the tools
The first program I installed was GIMP the graphic editing program. I'll need to do some learning about using it also, but I found how to do a screenshot, and where the screen shots were stored. GIMP was a bit odd, you can save the file but only as the XCF file and to be honest I have no clue what kind of file that is or how to use it in other programs or to make it visible in a web page.Poking around a bit I saw export file as an option, that worked that had all the typical choices for graphic files I am used to. So here is the first screenshot saved and edited:
PrtScr button does work and it saves the file, but it still took me awhile to find it. So I went out and found another program to work with taking screen shots. It is simply called Screenshot, or that is the only name I can see now for it.
With using screenshot you can name and choose where the files are going to be stored, a bonus since I don't want the micro card to hold everything with the operating system. It is kind of like stepping back to the days of the small hard drive storage. I'll eventually get another USB drive but for now I just need to not overload the system operations card.
Web Browser options, Books & Manuals
After doing some reading on line it seems that the Vivaldi web browser may be an option to use to get away from google also, for now though their Chromium browser seems to be working just fine.I was expecting a user manual in the box, nope didn't happen, I did finally find the book this evening while doing some exploring over on my Raspberry-Pi, it was in what they call the bookshelf.
When I was on the Raspberry-Pi page it seemed as if they wanted me to buy the book, but I could have been looking at it wrong. There is a lot of different free things though for the Raspberry-Pi. I should carve some time out to read through the book, or at least look at a few pages. The bookshelf holds a lot of books, really just links to online ones but a nice organization to the bookshelf, I kind of like it.
Storage
As I thought, having the USB MicroSD card holder is a big help, I can store my files and then move them to my desktop. I have already moved made a copy of my spreadsheet for November on to it, and will see how the Raspberry-Pi version of LibreOffice works. At least I am a little bit familiar with it and was glad to see it came pre-installed.As a bonus this evening, since everything is new, I tried to see if my Toshiba USB drive would work and it did. I do not think I will use it to often, but I may get a new smaller one for my Raspberry-Pi. I am a bit concerned about it causing heat issues, but it would be nice to have a large drive instead of a bunch of smaller SD cards to hold files.
Programming
I did spend a little time also over on the W3Schools site and have started going through their Python lesson section. I didn't get far, learning in the beginning, the extreme basics, is a slow process mostly due to the parts left out, that you will learn later.Still if I am able to put an hour a day in I may eventually be able to do something useful with it. Right now one of the things I am thinking I might want to do is a script that will pull data from the block chain like how many comments I made in October. I know there are sources out there but knowing where to get it and getting it yourself is two different stories.
I know a boring post for some, but I am still excited about the whole process. that was my day two. Knowing myself, I'll post a few more times about it then be on to something else and end up just doing an occasional "Where i'm at now" type of post.
